Robbery (2016)

Robbery is special because it takes a single, cramped convenience store and turns it into a pressure cooker where romance, crime, and pitch-black comedy collide with the manic confidence of a film that knows exactly how far it wants to go. Fire Lee stages the night like a blood-splattered grand guignol: funny in the way panic can be funny, tense in the way bad luck feels inevitable, and charged with the restless energy of young people staring at a world that doesn’t add up. Beneath the gory farce and escalating hostage chaos, there’s a sharp allegorical bite about a city where power grinds down the powerless, and the movie’s attitude makes that anger feel alive rather than preachy. It’s not for the squeamish or anyone craving a tidy, comforting arc, but if you want an ambitious Hong Kong indie that’s loud, vicious, and weirdly romantic in its despair, this one sticks.

Robbery (2016) is clearly trying to bottle Hong Kong’s late-night anxiety into a punky, blood-splattered convenience-store pressure cooker, mixing crime chaos with pitch-black comedy and a dash of romance. When it clicks, the energy is loud, fast, and weirdly cathartic, with a committed cast selling the “everything is spiraling” vibe. The catch is that it leans hard on implausible twists and increasingly incredulous escalations, so if you need your thrillers to follow believable logic, you’ll probably find yourself checking out rather than leaning in. This is best for viewers who enjoy anarchic, anything-goes farce and don’t mind the story running on attitude more than credibility.